You don’t have a man, you don’t have the truth. But you have money.

Authorship of the statement “Better to cry in a limousine than be happy on a bus” is attributed to various members of high society or people trying to break into high society. As they say in a housing estate in Piešťany, “gold diggers.”

Belle Burden’s memoir Strangers (Strangers) shows that although money cannot guarantee you happiness, in the event of adversity it can significantly soften the blow. It also shows that although pop culture stereotypically labels women as gold diggers, men benefit more significantly from the institution of marriage. Women, on the other hand, tend to suffer the greatest economic damage when it falls apart.

Burden comes from one of America’s wealthiest families, the Vanderbilts: her grandmother Babe Paley already belonged to New York high society and attended parties with Truman Capote. Belle’s life unfolds like a romantic film, until the moment when, at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, her husband suddenly leaves her for another woman. At that moment, she realizes that the person she has lived with for twenty years is a stranger to her, and that all the bills, property documents, tax returns, insurance policies and so on are foreign to her as well. Although she studied law, she worked only briefly before the wedding, and after the children were born her husband did not allow her to work (sic!).

“We made an unwritten agreement: he would devote himself exclusively to work and I would take care of the children. I sometimes felt it was unfair, mostly when I was stressed, when one of the children was ill or when they threw tantrums over something trivial. But most of the time I liked his passionate devotion to work. It was impressive, and I considered it admirable that he sacrificed so much time to his work, that he was a model employee and that he worked hard to provide long-term financial security for our family.”

Apart from the protagonists’ blindness to their own privilege, the story is nothing out of the ordinary. It would perhaps surprise only less cynical people than me how surgically precisely and coldly the husband abandoned not only his partner but also his own children. The chronological narrative and exhaustive listing of details from the couple’s life bore the readers. The book becomes more interesting if you approach it as a detective story in which you do not want to uncover who the murderer is, but who is actually the gold digger. Divorce hangs on the wall like Chekhov’s gun, and from the moment the central couple meet, you search for threads from which the perfect crime could be woven: marrying a wealthy heiress, having her carry and give birth to three children, and benefiting for years from her unpaid work around the children and household while building your career, earning millions and surely only accidentally forgetting to rewrite the prenuptial agreement in her disfavor.

I do not know whether, while reading, I hated James more for his outrageous nerve (when he came home to pack, he asked his soon-to-be ex-wife to prepare him a sandwich for the journey) or Belle for her blindness and naivety (She actually made him that sandwich! And she did not even spit in it!). When she used her own inheritance money to buy their New York apartment, registered in both their names, I raised an eyebrow, but when she also used her own money to buy their shared weekend house on Martha’s Vineyard (what a cliché!), I screamed. Of course her partner wanted to take that house from her during the divorce.

Although the divorce hurts Belle financially, the author somewhat dramatizes its impact. Yes, she risked having to sell properties she had bought herself in order to pay out a partner who had not contributed a cent to them. But she was never at risk of ending up without the means to live or on the street.

“I assumed that we both had to tighten our belts so that we could afford our life together. I had no idea that he earned millions of dollars a year. I had no idea how his earnings had accumulated. He knew everything about me, where every dollar of mine was, but I knew nothing about him. He did not hide it. I chose not to look. I chose not to know.”

The reactions of the “respectable families” from the country club to their separation testify to the double standard that American high society applies to men who abandon their families and shirk their children, and to women who dare to make waves and speak openly about their own experiences. Burden first published the story of the breakdown of her relationship as an essay in the popular New York Times column Modern Love. It could have remained there, as there was no need to expand it into a book. You know how they say in the corporate world, “this meeting could have been an email”? Instead of reading this book, write an email – to your financial adviser and go over your family finances together.

Belle Burden: Strangers. Tatran, 2026.

The author works in marketing